Descartes, Plato and the Cave Notes

Stephen Buckle's paper explores Descartes's indebtedness to Plato, arguing that Descartes consciously rewrites Plato's allegory of the cave in his Meditations on First Philosophy.

Buckle aims to push the interpretative tendency of recent scholarship a step further by highlighting Descartes's indebtedness to Plato.

Descartes and the Broad Platonic Tradition

• Hobbes criticized Descartes for rehashing old material from Plato and other ancient philosophers regarding the uncertainty of the senses.
• Descartes responded that he was not selling novelties but preparing readers for the subsequent Meditations by setting out the problems, especially distinguishing intellectual and corporeal things.
• Descartes highlights a fundamental division between intellectual and corporeal things, or more usefully, between the intellect and the senses. This division is evident in the doubts presented in the First Meditation.
• The First Meditation is organized into two types of doubt: perceptual errors and the dreaming argument. The dreaming argument raises a general doubt about the senses, corrected by reason.
• The second stage of doubt questions whether anyone can know if their intellect is oriented to the truth, considering divine omnipotence or the possibility of chance.
• Descartes feigns the existence of an evil demon to maintain the radical doubt initially established.
• The doubts in the First Meditation are structured around the division of the mind into sense and intellect, justified throughout the Meditations.
• This leads the seeker of truth to turn away from the senses to the intellect, culminating in the Second Meditation's insight that the intellect is inseparable from oneself.
• This message has a Platonic air, with the faculty psychology (sense, imagination, and intellect) being more Aristotelian but ultimately assimilating imagination to sense.
• The fundamental divide between sense and intellect mirrors that between body and mind, echoing Plato's message in the allegories of the sun, line, and cave in The Republic.
• True understanding requires turning away from the sensed world to eternal truths discoverable by the intellect, allowing the discovery that the rational mind is different in kind from the body.
• The intellect is divine, created directly by God, separable from the body, and immortal.
• Recent scholarship acknowledges Descartes' debts to the Neoplatonist tradition but lacks interest in how far he saw himself as consciously Platonic.
• The common view that Descartes introduced a radically new conception of the mind by including sense and imagination alongside intellect is misleading.
• The Second Meditation's conclusion is provisional, as the Sixth Meditation concludes that sense and imagination are separable from the mind, belonging to it only in so far as it is united with a body.
• The essential properties of the mind are only the purely intellectual powers of thinking and willing, a revival of a traditional, distinctly Platonic view.
• Affirming that it is the same mind that senses, imagines, thinks, and wills affirms the simplicity and unity of the mind, a central Platonic doctrine.
• Identifying this mind with consciousness and self-movement also has Platonic roots.
• Descartes' sharp separation of intellect and matter, on which the argument for the immortality of the soul is built, echoes Plato's argument in the Phaedo.
• In the Third Meditation, Descartes argues for innate ideas, reviving the doctrine from Plato's Meno.
• John Cottingham notes that the idea of illumination by turning away from the senses goes back to Plato and that Descartes' emphasis on the 'natural light' echoes the contrast between visible and intelligible light in Neoplatonic writers like Plotinus and Augustine.
• Descartes' dualism of sense and intellect aligns with the Platonic tradition.
• Descartes adapts Augustine's free will theodicy to solve the problem of error in the Fourth Meditation, construing error as intellectual evil arising from free will.
• Descartes aligns himself with the Augustinians, who were increasing in influence.
• Descartes was familiar with Augustine's On Free Choice of the Will and likely Confessions.
• A very similar argument for the indubitability of one's own existence occurs twice in Augustine's works
• Jean Silhon's The Immortality of the Soul (1634) argued that one's existence is indubitable, which may have suggested the connection to Descartes.
• Descartes understood the Augustinian tendency of his philosophy and relied on Augustinian themes in shaping central arguments.
• His project marries Augustinian theology with mechanical philosophy to replace Aristotelianism.
• Augustinianism is Christian Platonism, so Descartes' concerns led him directly to Plato, who was a role-model without peer.
• Descartes recommends reading the ancients in Rules for the Direction of the Mind, including Plato and Aristotle, for developing their minds.
• Descartes gives reason to believe he is acquainted with Plato's works and that he saw those works as relevant to his own project.
• Descartes recognizes distinctively Platonic elements in Augustine's writings and emphasizes these aspects of Augustine's views because of their Platonism.

Broadly Platonic Echoes in the Meditations

• Echoes of Platonic doctrines and themes are evident, sometimes through distinctive forms of expression.
• Plato introduces learning as recollection in the Meno, while Augustine treats it metaphorically.
• Descartes alludes to recollection in the Fifth Meditation, speaking of discerning truths about shape, number, and motion; and this puts him halfway between Plato and Augustine.
• Descartes speaks of a 'mental gaze,' evoking the metaphor of mental vision, a cornerstone of Plato's allegory of the sun, as also employed by Augustine.
• The term 'intuition' (Latin intueri) means 'to look, gaze at.'
• Although learning is described in terms of organizing images, the knowledge that this is what learning is is discerned 'not through images but as they really are and through the concepts themselves.'
• Socrates denies that rational theories make use of images in the Phaedo, and the Timaeus makes it clear that images belong to the non-rational realm.
• Rational thought is not a matter of images, especially regarding clear and distinct ideas with the mathematizable rather than the sensory.
• In the Sixth Meditation, the chiliagon example explains the difference between the intellect and the imagination: a chiliagon can be thought, even though it cannot (except confusedly) be imagined.
• These examples show Descartes self-consciously employing obviously-Platonic ideas.
• Descartes' reliance on obviously-Augustinian themes in shaping some of his central arguments shows the Augustinian tendency of his philosophy.
• Augustine finds much to emphasize about his differences from Platonists.
• In his discussion of Plato, he found much to emphasize about his differences from them
• His conclusions are silent on revealed religion, let alone on the special Augustinian concern with human helplessness and the need for divine illumination
• The turning the mind around
• Descartes states that the mind must be turned away carefully from those [sensory] things so that it can perceive its own nature as distinctly as possible.
• This terminology, of turning away or turning around the mind, is frequently to be found in Augustine's works.
• The expression so faithfully preserves a distinctively Platonic turn of phrase that it would be immediately obvious to anyone acquainted with the relevant passage in Plato's works; from Plato's treatment of the contrast between sense and intellect in his discussion of the meaning of the allegory of the cave.
• Given Augustinian is concerned with theodicy and with the need for personal salvation, whereas the Platonic passage is concerned with the need to turn from the senses to the intellect if fundamental truths are to be found:
  • Descartes' concern is the same as Plato's.
• Modern French translation renders the passage in such a way as to preserve the sense of an echo.
• Plato holds that the Forms do exist outside the heavens, nevertheless our access to them, in our mortal lives, is by attending to what is within us.
• At the end of each Meditation, Descartes pauses to survey what has been achieved therein.
• Descartes says "I should like to pause here and spend some time in the contemplation of God; to reflect on his attributes, and to gaze with wonder and adoration on the beauty of this immense light, so far as the eye of my darkened intellect can bear it."
  • Is an allusion to the allegory of the cave in the Republic
  • In the Second Meditation, Descartes offers a brief description of body as 'anything that can be limited by some shape' .
  • This echoes-if in reverse-the definition of shape Socrates offers in the Meno: 'shape is … the limit of a solid'.
  • At the end of the Fifth Meditation, Descartes argues there that only knowledge of God is able to anchor his beliefs based in clear and distinct perceptions, making them 'true and certain knowledge' rather than 'merely unstable and changeable opinions' (that is, even if true).
  • Dream Argument is also traceable to the cave
  • Descartes' conclusion is that 'I see plainly that there are never any sure signs by means of which being awake can be distinguished from being asleep' .

The Meditations as a Rewriting of Plato's Allegory of the Cave

• The structure of the allegory of the cave mirrors that of the Meditations.
• The three allegories themselves all deal with related aspects of the need to turn from the senses to the intellect
• The cave begins with its striking picture of human life as imprisoned in a world of darkness and shadows, which the moral of the three allegories is this: everyday life is sunk in illusion because of its dependence on the senses; turning the mind around to intellectual things discovers copies of reality; discovery of these copies sets us on the path to discover real things; reality is dependent on the Good, the ground of all being; this discovery enables us to return to everyday life and manage it properly, because we have been freed from illusion and error.
• The first application of the doubt, to the senses, leads to the discovery that one's state is akin to dreaming.
• The second application, to the intellect, seems, at first, to reduce the mind to total scepticism; but closer examination, in the Second Meditation, shows that the intellect cannot be doubted in its entirety
• The contents of the mind are examined in the Third Meditation, leading to the conclusion that many of my ideas are either my own creations, or else copies of things outside me.
• To discover that God exists is not yet to discover the relationship of God to what exists-that is the task of the Fourth and Fifth Meditations.
• In Book II of the Republic, Plato argues that 'being deceived in one's own mind' is hated by gods as well as men, and, because the gods have no reason to lie, 'there is no falsehood at all in the realm of the spiritual and the divine' .
• The Fifth Meditation follows, in that material things exist because brought into being by God.
• The Sixth Meditation is the return to the cave: the return to the material world, armed with the necessary tools for working out what each thing is.
• The moral of Descartes' tale is less optimistic than that of Plato.

The Socratic Enquirer of the Discourse

• Supposing him to be self-consciously Platonic, and wishing to signal the fact.
• In the Phaedo Socrates Proposes to treat as false whatever cannot be accepted as true, which is the same method Descartes uses.
• shifting attention to Part Six of the Discourse, with three other remarks catching the eye on the lookout for Platonic echoes
• Descartes claims there that, unlike the mere 'speculative philosophy taught in the schools', his investigations will help 'to secure the general welfare of mankind', in particular 'the maintenance of health … the chief good and the foundation of all the other goods in this life' .
• echoing Socrates' requirement, in the Phaedo autobiography, that true knowledge must concern itself with the highest goods.
• The publishing his own principles is like 'opening windows and admitting daylight into that cellar where they have gone down to fight' .

Some Benefits of Recognizing the Platonic Connection

• This bring platos back into the picture when interpreting the Cartesian Corpus has a number of advantages.
• By recognizing the structural dependence on the allegory of the cave, the overall ambition of the Meditations is immediately made clear.